Blastoff from the Past: A Look Back at the Space Shuttle

The first space shuttle to fly was Columbia, shown here sitting on the launch pad before its maiden flight. (Enterprise was the first shuttle built, but it was initially not rated for spaceflight and only used for testing.) Columbia first launched on April 12, 1981, the 20th anniversary of the first human spaceflight, and was piloted by John Young, a Gemini and Apollo astronaut. Its first few missions were purely operational, for testing the spacecraft’s technical performance.